jmc wrote: Student loans, president has been set. Taxes and Govt. bucks are set aside. Including taxes. Govt. is heavily involved in health care an easy leap.
Better than a mandate.
That might hold some water if the federal government issued loans, or guaranteed the loans, made to people to pay for their medical treatment, but what if someone didn't apply for the loan to pay the bill? The leap you are wanting to make is no more constitutional than the mandate to purchase products chosen by the government is. The reason that student loans are not included in a personal bankruptcy is that the loan has been guaranteed with tax dollars from the outset. The money, in case of default, is not owed to a private company, it is owed, as are taxes, to the federal government. If you wanted to allow providers to refuse to treat people unless and until they first applied for and received a federal loan to cover the costs of their care, you could certainly do that I suppose, but you would then have to abandon the current law which requires private entities to provide care regardless of ability to pay and I'm not so sure that the left is willing to go down that path either.
I guess Roberts agreed with me, now we have a way to get rid of the mandate and force the freeloaders to pay.
Now we just need someone to actually read the law and figure out whether or not we can actually afford it.
Sadly, just because it went through a Democrat heavy Legislative and Executive Branch and found constitutional by the Judicial Branch doesn't make it good policy. I just can't see how we can afford it.
I suppose you could actually READ the CBO's report on the cost savings and how it will be paid for... But that would burst your conservative anti-government bubble. (And I mean the REAL CBO REPORT--not the FauxNews and right-wing blog's "interpretation" of it...)
